Further Study of 2-to-1 Mappings Over F2n

2-to-1 mappings over finite fields play an important role in symmetric cryptography, particularly in the constructions of APN functions, bent functions, and semi-bent functions. Very recently, Mesnager and Qu [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65 (12): 7884-7895] provided a systematic study of 2-to-1 mappings over finite fields. In particular, they determined all 2-to-1 mappings of degree at most 4 over any finite field. Besides, another research direction is to consider 2-to-1 polynomials with few terms. Some results about 2-to-1 monomials and binomials have been obtained in [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65 (12): 7884-7895]. Motivated by their work, in this present paper, we push further the study of 2-to-1 mappings, particularly over finite fields with characteristic 2 (binary case being the most interesting for applications). Firstly, we completely determine 2-to-1 polynomials with degree 5 over \mathbb F_2ⁿ using the well-known Hasse-Weil bound. Besides, we consider 2-to-1 mappings with few terms, mainly trinomials and quadrinomials. Using the multivariate method and the resultant of two polynomials, we present two classes of 2-to-1 trinomials, which explain all the examples of 2-to-1 trinomials of the form x^k+βx^l + αx ∈ \mathbb F _2ⁿ[x] with n ≤ 7. We derive twelve classes of 2-to-1 quadrinomials with trivial coefficients over \mathbb F_2ⁿ.